Defending our culture

The many faces of Graziella Pogolotti in the Cuban cultural framework

In pedagogy, in art critic, in literature, Graziella Pogolotti generates respect in and outside Cuba. She doesn’t need to presume, she doesn’t need to pose, her wisdom flows with an overwhelming spontaneity.
Apart from the privilege of having been rocked by great Cuban artists, that small woman earned herself through her work, a place in the culture of a country where she was not born, but where she has laid deep and strong roots.
With several national awards and dedicated entirely to the countries’ cultural development, Pogolotti doesn’t have an indulgent sight, but one which is marked by huge aspirations of a country that calls her.
How did the girl Graziella Pogolotti saw the highest representatives of the artistic vanguard of the XX century in Cuba?
As very nice adults. Victor Manuel was a kind of false uncle that would take me to the park when no one wanted to take me there and Carlos Enríquez could have been my godfather if I had been through that experience. For me they were really close people much before than they were artists.
I met others while I was a child, but I was never that close to them.
Others like who?
Like Amelia... I remember her in exhibitions while I was a child, but I got to have a relation with her a lot later, when I was an art critic.
How do you remember her?
She had certain limitations due to her deafness, but when you managed to get over that, she was a very sweet, loving person, who was in harmony with the environment around her, that house environment, the intimacy of the workshop, which was a kind of garage at the back of her house. She was also a very modest person.
How was Graziella Pogolotti’s relation with her father?
He was a severe man, a little authoritarian whenever he remembered he had a paternal function, very disciplined and very ordered, but whenever he wasn’t fulfilling his father role, we had very friendly talks. He could go easily from one thing to the other: from the paternal authority to a conduct very similar to that you have with an adult.
You started writing at the age of fifteen and it were theatrical descriptions. How have you perceived the theatrical development of the country?
I could perceive its development from the age of the ADAD Theater (Academia de Artes Dramáticas (Dramatic Arts Academy)), which was a group that had a function once a month in a small school theater. That group was one of those who inaugurated the renovation of theatrical language, and it introduced the international repertoire of the XX century, but it had a very limited number of spectators, who came once a month to that small place.
Nonetheless, that was one of the seeds for the appearance, in the 1950’s, of a multiplicity of tendencies with the appearance of the theatrical small auditoriums in the area of Vedado as well as in Habana Vieja (Old Havana). Those shows covered a spectrum that went from the most experimental searches or the repertoire of the most recent premier in Paris or in New York, to a more commercial theater that tried to guarantee the spectator a nice time many times after it had eaten.
That time of tendency multiplication, which coincided with an everyday tendency, because there were no longer shows once a month, but every day, created a public and contributed to the development of many actors, who frequently acted on theater at the cost of an enormous personal sacrifice (they weren´t paid a salary, they had to contribute with their own resources to the wardrobe, the scenography…). That started to prepare the road for that decisive moment that is produced right before the Revolution with the creation of Teatro Estudio (Studio Theater).
The group receives that inheritance and makes a change of tremendous reach. It doesn’t just stages plays, but it makes a group of actors and directors coincide around a determined theater, culture and society conception. That is a starting point for the Cuban theater.
During the 1960’s there is a multiplicity of tendencies again, many groups are created that don’t have the commercial character of some of the small auditoriums of the 50’s, but they all respond each one to artistic projects.
They cover a very wide repertoire; they give a greater possibility to national dramatic writing and the number of spectators increases dramatically. That is when theater starts to be, in a much greater sense than ever before, a part of the Cuban everyday life.
The next big change occurs with the creation of Teatro escambray (Escambray Theater), which puts forward a new relationship with the spectator, a relation that is open to dialog as well as critic. The group redefines the theatrical spaces outside of the traditional frameworks, and starts constructing based on those new needs, an artistic language which belongs just to it.
That diversity of perspectives has been present throughout the development of Cuban theater, which had without a doubt a decisive change with the triumph of the Revolution, among other things because it established a link with Latin American theater, from which we had been quite far away.
Talking about Latin America and having into account that you opened at the University of Havana the degree French Language and Literature, what place do you give French culture in the formation of national identities in our region?
For many reasons, French culture has played an important role in areas of European and Latin American culture. The two starting points were the ideas of the French Revolution and the Illumination on the XVIII, had a very strong influence on all the starters of Latin American independence, not just on the fighters, but also on the thinkers, on the intellectuals, who saw in that France the place from where new ideas were emerging.
That gave rise to France, and especially Paris, during the XIX and XX, I would say until the Second World War, becoming the emitting center of culture towards what we call the West.
Paris was also the meeting point for writers, artists and students from all over the world, it was the center of an important publishing industry, it was the place were many of the battles of romanticism, impressionism, realism, of the avant-garde took place, ant it was therefore associated to whatever was new. And also, during the colonial time, it was an alternative against Spain, which represented the metropolitan power.
Our cultures had over the XIX and XX century very close talks with France, and especially with its literature. That respect can be seen in Martí when he reads the works of Victor Hugo, in the modernists poets who look back to French symbolism, in the development of the naturalist narrative among us and later on in the avant-garde debate, that can be seen not just in Cuba, but all over Latin America.
What is the Paris of your memories?
It is a Paris that I believe doesn’t exist anymore. I was there for the last time in 1980 and I found a city mucho more bright city, much more spectacular and scenographic, much more influenced by tourism, with infinity of boutiques where there were none before… I just felt the loss of the Barrio Latino (Latin district), which I had known on the time when university was concentrated on that place, around the Sorbona , the Medicine faculty, the old Santa Genoveva (Saint Genoveva) Library, and which had that youth atmosphere, of students from all over the world.
After May 1968, the distribution of the University was reprogrammed, the Barrio Latino (Latin district) was no longer the main center, there were many new universities in the outskirts of the city, and that center of life was transformed and turned into a scenario for tourists.
Having been born in France, with a Russian mother, Italian and English grandparents, how come your roots in Cuba are so solid and have produced so many results?
That is a mystery… There are many cases. There are cases of people who were born here almost by coincidence and lived very few years in Cuba, like José María Heredia, who always saw himself as Cuban in a time when the nation hadn’t been formed yet. There are other writers and artists who lived a long time outside of the country and have nevertheless always kept their roots.
My own father, he lived a long time on other countries, always wanted to be buried here, and he felt himself deeply Cuban.
In which way did I integrate myself? It is very hard to find out. It happened bit by bit, at school, in the neighborhood, on the park, as the history of this country was revealed to me as well.
Also, the feeling of belonging gets deeper as one has to construct things, to make things, like the farmer who feels very close to his land because there is the tree he planted years ago, and the house, maybe poor, but which he constructed with his own hands.
I have been able to participate in the construction of many things here in the teaching and in the culture field. So that is how that feeling has become deeper and deeper.
You have said that there was a time in your life when you felt uncomfortable with a surname that didn’t let you live anonymously. How was that process of reconciliation with your heritage?
I felt very uncomfortable with my surname when I was studying at university because my teachers knew me, they knew my surname, and so they would ask me everything. I was their favorite victim, especially when they hadn’t learned yet the names of the rest of my classmates. I tried to hide, so that they wouldn’t see me, so that they would forget that I was there.
I also wanted to be seen as myself, by my own identity and not as somebody’s daughter.
Then, as I started to make my own path, the surname became less of a burden.
In your opinion, what is the importance of critic?
It is indispensable in every aspect of life, without it there is no possibility of making things better in the social sphere, of diagnosing and resolving problems. More specifically in the field of arts and literature, critic is a way of having a dialog which works with the artists, as well as with the public, and contributes to forming a network of relations in which a culture gets formed.
Culture is not made with isolated pieces of work, no matter how extraordinary they might be. The great Spanish culture of the Golden century was not made just because of Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo and Lope, but because there was a very wide network where the works of these writers could be placed and talk among themselves.
As the cultural base gets wider and wider, the role of the critic grows in that network.
What does the name Vicentina Antuña remind you?
It reminds me of my professor at university. She was a professor of Latin, which wasn’t precisely one of my favorite subjects; I was very captivated by contemporary.
From that time onwards, we established with Vicentina a permanent dialog. Whenever she finished her class, she would go to have a cup of coffee and around her there was always a group of students who would get together to talk and to discuss any topic, about life, the current moment, a cultural event, political conflicts, university problems. She would animate that dialog; she would favor it without intervening in it in an authoritarian way.
Afterwards we kept a very close communication when she was Director of Culture and of the School of Letters. She developed a very peculiar teaching method through generations of students who went by her classrooms and she left us with a very necessary lecture of critic, rigor and respect for ideas that are different.
What can you tell me of the most recent generation of writers in Cuba?
There has been a process of acceleration for the presence of the new generations. There are very young writers who publish and make themselves known very early in their life, they express themselves in different tendencies, they have broken frontiers and also in many cases, they have a conscience of their profession that took longer to reach before.
There are many writers who are university graduates, time ago, they were mostly self-taught and that implied a much slower process to acquire the experience and to learn the profession.
The possibility of publishing also favors today the confrontation and the maturation of a literary piece of work.
You said sometime: “culture has to become an everyday event”, what is done in Cuba in order to achieve that?
Many things are being tried, but we haven’t achieved what we were hopping for. To produce certain events on a national level and with a wide notification is one of the aspects, in which the Book Fair succeeds, to which a huge amount of people go, not just to buy, but also to spend the day, frequently the entire family, or to the Havana Biennale when it has a urban display… The collection of festivals helps, but the effort can not be limited to those situations that occur just once a year.
If we want to talk about culture integrated to our every day happenings, which has to compliment the everyday work of the institutions, it has to be much more systematic with a deeper communitarian work that is according to the peculiarities in each region, with the cultural preparation of the teachers.
We have a program which leads basically to the fulfillment of that aspiration, but it has to be perfected, it has to undergo critics and adapt into each specific place, not just because culture opens the field of spiritual life, but also because it sharpens sensibility.

posted by Lilith @ 7:34 AM